Opencroquet

zymano writes "OSnews has some information about Opencroquet, a 3d operating system worked on by Alan Kay, who also is one of the inventors of Smalltalk, one of the fathers of object oriented programming, conceiver of the laptop computer, inventor of much of the modern windowing GUI. The OS is a 3D environment running through the Squeak environment on top of another operating system. It requires a supported 3D accelerator. Squeak is an interpreted language similar to Smalltalk. Could be ssslooooww. Way cool screenshot."

Comments

Re:Flash?

[thatguywhoiam]

Well, we're getting OT, but what the hell.

Flash as navigation? It allows you to completely destroy the usability of the site. Middle click to open in a new window? Gone. Right click to select "open in new tab"? Gone. Tab through links? Gone (or possibly there if somebody using flash has a clue, unlikely). Typeahead finding a link? Gone.

You're right, but for a particular instance. See, I suspect you are a technical person (coder, engineer, or possibly researcher, or all 3. whatever). You spend a great deal of time searching on the web, which is what a lot of people do. You like your standard tools for searching and arranging your information. Flash sites disable many of these tools.

Problem with this is, that Flash site should either A) not exist as a Flash site, or B) you're forcing a site to do what it doesn't want to do.

A Flash site with its own interface is just dandy for certain applications, mostly those having to do with marketing, or presentation, or conceptual visualization. Remember that Flash is just a clever animation, like Director was; it is essentially linear, with stops-and-starts, and GOTOs.

Besides, I would argue that I have found at least as many HTML sites abusing JavaScript and bad design in their navigation as Flash sites. Flash just has the capacity to do more damage. The pwoer of Flash is not a flaw.

When I have a client that tells me they want a specific font, and sound effects, and a 3d spin-around of their new shoe (for example), I say Flash every time. It's the best choice. It's a commerical, a glossy interactive brochure. It can look like any damn thing it wants.

If it was a site for weekend trips, for example, thats a PHP site with little Flash demos that launch in windows. That way you get Flash presentations (what its meant for), with searchable, right-clickable, parsable HTML content in the right framework.

My point is, don't blame the tech, and don't blame Flash for crappy navigation. It has it's place; it belongs in exploratory interfaces, not useful ones. This is of course not to say that exploratory != useful, but in situations where one wants to immerse themselves and casually browse a rich experience with sound, the right fonts, and a generally superior (depending...) experience, Flash is great.

If its something like Slashdot, or the Beeb, or SourceForge (heh, can you imagine?).. not so much.

Oh by the way, indexing is not a problem. And stylesheets, as cool as they are, cannot compete with absolute sub-pixel vector positioning. Not to mention, as a web designer, I have far less problems debugging a Flash site between browsers, as the plug-in is more consistent than the HTML engine.